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How to be victorious?

The 8 limbs of yoga is a timeless guideline to a Victorious Life even in our modern world:

Moving, stretching and strengthening the body

Breath awareness

Knowledge and awareness of the senses, feelings and emotions

Self-study

Self-control

Ability to focus

Accepting and surrendering

Merge with the divine

One should practice these steps every day in one proportion/order or another. There is no right or wrong methodology. We also go through phases in our lives spending more time on a specific limb and then move to the next one. Life circumstances shape the path. We just need to stay conscious. The only mistake we can make is when a day goes by without learning something about ourselves.

Good way to start yoga with the physical body, then learning to control the mind and becoming aware of our relationships with the world around us. The rest will unfold, mantras and prayers can keep you on the path.

Kundalini Yoga and the Use of ‘Recreational Drugs’

“If you have to be addicted to something, be addicted to doing sadhana daily. Otherwise, addiction is not a source of freedom. And you are not free by taking drugs. The neurons of the brain will become feeble. You will lose your nostril pituitary sensitivity. You can never smell the subtlety of life. You’ll always be dragging your life.” Yogi Bhajan

Kundalini Yoga and drugs don’t mix. This is one of the first things Yogi Bhajan taught. When he came to Los Angeles in December of 1968, he witnessed the height of the self-destructive behavior of the hippie drug culture. He was appalled by the tragedy that addictions and drug use brought into people’s lives.

Many of his first students came to his classes high. He was quick to instruct them that combining Kundalini Yoga with recreational drug use was unhealthy at the least, and could be dangerous. According to yogic thought, drugs interrupt the natural flow of the energy of the chakras and the aura, and put strain on the nervous system to compensate. In addition, the drug-induced high and the powerful energies released from the practice of Kundalini Yoga can get out of control with unpredictable results.

At the time, drugs seemed the only way to attain the high that was longed for, the only way to pass through the doors of perception into experience. He reminded his students that the strongest mood and perception altering drugs were endogenous—we produce them in our own internal biotech factory—our bodies!

“Although many drug users thought of Kundalini Yoga as another way to get ‘high,’ Kundalini Yoga is a way to becoming the higher self. It is getting out of pain, subconscious turmoil, and boredom. It gives you energy from within that cannot be given or created by any outside substance.” Shakti Parwha Kaur

Drugs like cocaine prevent the parasympathetic nervous system from doing its job. Marijuana severely affects the functioning of the brain. It is like running an engine without oil. It interferes with spinal fluid circulation. It also lowers testosterone levels and reduces the number of connections between neurons in areas that affect memory and motivation. It attacks the nerve centers in the spine. The entire nervous system—all 72,000 nerves in the body—are damaged. Whenever the brain is affected by drugs, its usual control of the expansion and contraction of the brain hemispheres is destroyed. Then whether the person is using more drugs or not, that brain hemisphere can expand at any time. People get spaced out, forget what they are doing.

Yogi Bhajan knew that by practicing Kundalini Yoga, his students would not only experience an even higher ‘high,’ but they would be repairing their nervous system and brain. It’s not a temporary ‘high,’ but a permanent spiritual experience with no damaging side-effects.He said it would take three years of doing Kundalini Yoga and eating a healthy diet to repair the damage that drugs had done.

Yogi Bhajan never told his students to stop taking drugs, but he pointed out the effects of taking them, and he gave simple things to do as an alternative:

“When you feel the urge for a stimulant, take seven long deep breaths, holding each inhalation to the maximum. Or do Breath of Fire. It is the most powerful remedy! If you do a half-hour of Breath of Fire every day, there are a lot of troubles that you can keep miles away.” Yogi Bhajan

Fortunately, it’s never too late to try to improve conditions. By practicing Kundalini Yoga you have begun to mend and repair, heal, and strengthen your body and mind.

If you have taken drugs, you can get rid of the after-effects by doing sadhana every day.

“Many people who stick to sadhana have been found to be totally clear of the effects and abnormalities created by the use of drugs.” Yogi Bhajan, The Aquarian Teacher Training Manual Level 1, p. 250

SuperHealth

Yogi Bhajan reached out to all those young students who had fallen into drug use. He inspired and guided a SuperHealth program in Tucson, Arizona, for many years in the 1970s and 80s. He consulted with programs in Boston, Moscow and elsewhere. He shared many techniques to help with detox and recovery from drugs and alcohol: yoga, meditation, body treatments, special nutritional guidelines and food supplements, counseling and more.

Pure diet, vegetarian foods and special medicinal foods are signatures of Kundalini Yoga therapies. Change the nutritional and herbal support of the body and you change the energy signature of stress. It is like giving a helping hand, or an infusion of hope, to every cell of the body.

Examples of foods that help remove the impulses and irritations from the body are:

Basil and Fennel Tea: Make a combination of basil and fennel to help relax the nervous system and reduce impulsiveness.

Onions, ginger and garlic: combined and eaten three times a day— 1/2 cup at a time—steadies the nerves and eases digestion.

Fresh juices: a good combination is 8 oz. of carrot juice and one half to I oz. of garlic juice. Sip it a bit at a time. Your body responds to the quality of the taste as much as the components of the food. This combination changes your feelings from negative to positive, increases your immunity and supports the liver.

A student asked me about my opinion of inebriants.I’m sorry? I couldn’t hear him well.
Like marijuana, he said, softly.
Oh. I support legalization, I said, matter-of-factly.
No, I mean for spiritual transformation, he said. Ohh.

He described the blissful feelings and the state of communion he had recently experienced while high on marijuana. He said he had felt a sense of oneness, a loss of self and a heightened sense of awareness, while inebriated.

He is a good student, and I appreciated the trust he had in me. I took my time in responding.

It can give the illusion of a mystical experience, I said. But it’s just that; an illusion. And it comes at a high cost, I continued. Because he is an exceptionally intelligent and curious student, I went forth. Part of the illusion is created through temporary suspension of the left-brain dominance we’ve all been nurtured on – that part of us that is driven by critical reasoning, problem solving and formulas, and by an inexplicable need to prove stuff. So, for a moment, with that overbearing part of us at ease, you feel less like competing, and instead, more in touch with others. You feel more receptive, and more in tune with your feelings and instincts. You feel less driven by that need to figure it out and be right. You’re even fine with the unexplainable. It feels blissful.

But a genuine spiritual state is found in presence. It’s not found in some magical place. And the irony is that when you’re high, you cannot sustain your attention long enough to be present. You cannot be mindful when you’re high. Heck, you can’t even sit up straight when you’re high. Thus, the ironic conclusion is that you end up preventing the very spiritual state you’re chasing. Spiritual practice is defeated by getting high.

True spiritual practice is practice at being here. So, inebriated, you rob yourself of the opportunity to develop the kind of discipline that you not only can turn to at any time, but that nurtures within you the ability to maintain this state of mind. You rob yourself of the profound sense of peacefulness and composure that comes from sustained presence. Inebriated, rather than develop a sincere acceptance of what is, you merely feed the desire to run and hide from life. It is a high cost indeed.

By turning to inebriants, you also nurture a dependency. You become addicted to what seemed at first, like a magical feeling. Because the feeling was temporary, you have to continue using, in order to find it again. They call it “chasing the dragon” in the context of harder drugs, but even with the less-scary stuff, you find yourself ensnared in the same trap because you will have deprived yourself of the ability to find contentment through your own efforts. You’ll be looking for it on the outside, just like so many others who rummage forever in the garbage bins of the world’s many cheap thrills, and only develop addictions along the way – they gamble, they drink, they overeat, they have affairs, and they watch porn and none of it takes them anywhere worthwhile, except to the shrink.

Balancing the brain is a good thing. Dislodging ourselves from the tyranny of the left-brain is a much-needed thing in this society. But how beautiful it would be to nurture that inner harmony through your own true discipline! That’s a real high! That’s what meditation does: it fixes the brain. Like other forms of yoga and moving forms of meditation, as found in the martial arts, it brings about the harmony that comes from opening up into the softer world of the right-brain, from opening the heart center and releasing that deeply ingrained habit of proving, accumulating and competing, at any cost. But all practical function is thwarted when you’re high. Thus mastering these forms of moving meditation would be difficult, at best.

I then reminded my attentive student of the film we saw in class on the life of the yogis in India. Do you remember when they talked about the “fake yogis?” He remembered right away. They were the ones who smoked hashish.

How Understanding Addiction and the Pituitary Gland Hooked Me on Kundalini Yoga

By Ek Ong Kaar Kaur Khalsa

Back in the Stone Ages, or the early 1990’s to be exact, I was a recent college graduate suffering from insomnia. During that time in my life, I dressed all in black, was involved with grass roots activism and regularly attended CODA meetings. CODA, for those of you who might not know, is a 12-Step program for people who have loved ones suffering from drug or alcohol addiction. It stands for “Codependents Anonymous.”

A friend of mine told me about the 3HO community in Houston where these “yogis” got up at 4 a.m. to meditate. Since I was not sleeping anyway, I drove to the center one morning on a whim. A tall guy with a beard said, “Welcome,” in a booming voice when I walked in. The morning sadhana involved shoulder stand, plow pose and lots of breath of fire. It was my first time doing Kundalini Yoga.

In the weeks and months ahead, I kept coming back for sadhana and for regular Kundalini Yoga classes. But I remember the moment when I really got “hooked.”

One of the teachers, Guruatma Kaur, gave a class on Yogi Bhajan’s teachings about addiction. It was a subject that touched me in a very personal way, so I decided to go to her day-long workshop. Guruatma created this great drawing, illustrating the soul and its relationship to the pineal and the pituitary glands. She described how the pituitary gland was the master gland – how it regulated the glands of the entire body. But the pituitary needed to take its orders from somewhere. Through meditation, the pineal gland secretes and creates a golden chord with the pituitary. This, in turn, causes the pituitary to function in such a way that the entire body comes into harmony with the soul. Then a person can begin the process of self-control…in essence, gaining the ability to live to their True or authentic self.

However, if the pineal did not talk to the pituitary, then the pituitary would look for something else to give it “orders.” Every addictive substance – from sugar to alcohol to drugs to sex to video games – stimulates the pituitary. This, she explained, is where Yogi Bhajan said addiction originated from: the lack of communication between the pineal and the pituitary.

This particular teaching was so powerful for me that I become instantly and completely enamored with Kundalini Yoga and Yogi Bhajan’s teachings.

Yogi Bhajan taught a wide range of tools and techniques to understand and help people heal themselves of addictive tendencies. The program is called “SuperHealth.” I think many people struggle with addictive or at least compulsive behavior on a regular basis. Some addictions have very light social consequences. Where would Starbucks be if people did not crave their morning cup of coffee? Some addictions have incredibly severe social consequences, including losing one’s family, freedom and even one’s life. But the common thread among all addictive tendencies is very simple: does your pituitary talk to your pineal?

This spring, there is a wonderful opportunity in Espanola, New Mexico, USA to learn about Yogi Bhajan’s SuperHealth program first hand. Mukta Kaur Khalsa, who was trained by Yogi Bhajan, directed SuperHealth—distinguished as a specialized hospital in Arizona for many years. In February, she will offer a Specialty Training on this topic. For those who would like to learn and teach others about the SuperHealth techniques, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity.

It is important to remember that Yogi Bhajan began his mission with the flower children of the 60’s, who were using drugs to expand their minds and find God. Yogi Bhajan’s message was so simple. Drugs are a drag. There is a more natural way to go. His first teachings on yoga, diet, meditation, and lifestyle were designed to help these “seekers of truth” break away from the false stimulation of drugs. He wanted them to re-establish the inner-dialogue between the pineal and the pituitary: between the soul and the personal identity. Everything that got built came from that foundation.

Yoga and recreational drugs do not go together

Numerous people came to me in the past couple of years who asked about recreational drugs. I do not support practicing when one is high. I have tried many forms of drugs in my twenties and I have worked very hard to mend the damage in the past fifteen years. I do not drink, smoke or use drugs, my happiness and peace lies in my sadhana(spiritual practice). I much rather quote my Master and teachers when it comes to giving advice to others whether to mix yoga and drugs. So if you are interested why I would not suggest you take any of those momentarily “happy or calm pills or puffs” here it is:

Yogi Bhajan Lecture: Self-Reverence

Lecture Excerpts by Yogi Bhajan, July 26, 1996

You are born, and you are divine, and you are you. You don’t have to become a human. You are human. Being a human is better than being an angel, and better than a sage, and better than any power of God that there is. You are human, therefore, you are in the image of God. But you want to look like your own image, therefore, you are stupid. You are not being like the one who made you.

You have “x” amount of prana, and “x” amount of energy called “youth,” and in “x” amount of time you can make the best of it, and that’s all it is. It’s as if there is a bank, and you have ten thousand dollars or one million dollars, whatever your expense account is, and you have a sixty-five year visit in which to spend it. How you’ll live, which motel you’ll live in, which hotel you’ll live in, what you do with life, that’s your problem, not God’s.

Happiness is your birthright. You can’t get your birthright, so you start fantasizing and you start romancing. Romance and fantasy take you away from reality. That’s why you have no endurance, you have no courage to have endurance, and you fall apart. One opposition, two oppositions, ten oppositions, twenty oppositions. You go down as if you don’t exist. Jack and Jill went down the hill. Woosh. Not right, folks. What is not right is left.

With the Guru’s blessing you earned this life, and you have earned this human body which is worshipped by angels, not only by you. And through this body you can understand Infinity, and with reverence, worship, and understanding, you can understand the totality of God. You know how blissful it is?

Have you seen these kids when they take all that (Yogi Bhajan demonstrates a person taking drugs by sniffing some substance through his nose)? “Oh, I’m in ecstasy.” Well, you have three hundred dollars less and you are stupid forever. Yes, you are in ecstasy.

And under the influence of these drugs you do things. You have wet dreams. You have cold sweats. Sometimes you get the shakes. What is this? It’s not you. It is good to get sick and fall apart once in a while. A car does it, why not you? But the problem is, your parts are not replaceable. They don’t have a Jiffy lube to lube you up.

Once you lose a part of you, folks, you are gone. One part that you are losing these days with drugs is called lmpactuous Sensitivity. This generation, the Sixties generation, has lost it. Drugs may do good to you for a while, it’s your money. I’m not asking you not to use them, but you shall never be you again.

That’s why I started Kundalini Yoga here. I wasn’t interested in gaining my leadership or membership. I saw the tragedy of mankind. I saw how damaged they were. We picked up young bodies left on trails, eaten by animals, unrecognizable, and sometimes their identification led us to their homes. You can’t believe it.

But what is a drug? When you take any drug which makes you hallucinate, it means your brain cells are stretched to the area and extent beyond what they should be. So the chances of developing sensitivity and experiencing Infinity are lost.

I remember somebody ate a brownie. For six days he was saying, “I am Yogiji, and I am with Guru Ram Das, and I am having all there is. And I know what it is.” (Yogi Bhajan says all this in a sing-song voice.) “They are all my friends, I am in Heavens. I’m seeing angels. Lord Shiva came yesterday to massage me.” For seven days I had to sit by his bed. And this is what I was hearing: “Oh, oh, Yogiji. I am Yogi Bhajan, I’m here. He has gone into my whole body. And my legs are his legs. My hands are….” And I was sitting on the chair, by his side. Seven long days! Finally I got tired of sitting, my buttocks started hurting; I just took care of his temples and he woke up.

I said, “Hi, Yogiji. He said, “No, you are Yogiji.”

I said, “Oh yes? I just wanted you to come back to yourself.” There was no self. The self, whether it was great or it was bad, right or wrong, it got stretched. And sometimes when you stretch something, it doesn’t come back.

So people have acid and cocaine and all these drugs, but the worst of all is marijuana. That’s the worst. Every drug has a limited feature and flushes out through the urine. Marijuana does not get out through the urine. Actually marijuana is an herb which is used for stomach ailments. It numbs the internal wound of the digestive system. That’s what it was used for. But the moment you smoke it, it hits your pituitary and that’s it, you’re gone. It freezes the serum in the spine, and you will never have gray matter of the quality that you had, doesn’t matter how you think you may be.

You don’t want to project you. You want to project somebody else. You are the power. You don’t need the power. You are the beauty. You don’t need the beauty. You are the success. You don’t need the success. You are the sex. You don’t need to sex yourself.

Infinity cannot be measured. Reverence cannot be explained, because reverence is Infinity. Reverence has such a power that it becomes

Infinity, and for you to become Infinity, you have to have self-reverence, not reference.

You need fifteen breaths a minute; that’s what you normally take. And when you are excited, emotional, drugged, sexual, sensual, excited, whatever, you go up to twenty-four. Sometimes you go to thirty-one, something like that. It’s very simple mathematics. Suppose you have enough breath of life at the rate of one breath for one year, so you take one breath a minute, you can live fifteen years. Suppose you have breath of life for one hundred years. At fifteen breaths a minute, at that rate, you can live 1500 years. That’s how yogis extend their life—by practicing one breath a minute. When you practice one breath a minute, then you become Pavan Guru—you become the light and knowledge of the prana, and then you know the Universe, the Universe knows you.

Yoga and suffering

Yoga is to remove our human suffering. Many of us have no idea that we suffer, because we cover it well with addictions (for a while). Seeking momentarily satisfaction in sex, eating, drinking, working, and smoking, shopping, moving, traveling, collecting impulses or even controlling the world. We all know how it goes...

Then we find yoga(or yoga finds us when we are desperate enough).

And we think this is it! We found happiness!!

Poses, asanas, success, flying, levitating, all smiles, burning and sweating until we can move. We lose weight, appetite changes, our taste shifts, we get in a glow. All is AWEsome!!

Then downhill comes(law of the universe): exhaustion , mood shifts, all up goes down, have no drive to pose and we want to give up our spiritual path"because yoga did not help me", it did not do the trick, it is NOT happiness...its still just an addiction...(but the best kind).

Stillness, sitting, rethinking is craved. Dreams occur at night, the subconscious and unconscious kick in, our shadow shows up intensely, we lose patience, we might even curse, we want to quit this life because we are unhappy and half dead...and that’s when the real dance begins!!

When no loud music can cover up, nor make up. No 'cool magazine cover posture picture' quenches our thirst any longer. We don't know what's happening. We cry, we sad, we break....we die into ourselves. We cease to be who we thought we were. And that's when real relationships begin, when we truly start to listen!

We remain quiet and still, the chatter of habit shuts up, we are finally within ourselves and that's when we begin to be ourselves amongst others.

Yes, yoga removes suffering but it shows why we suffer in the first place. No way around it only through it!!

Once we are aware of our own inner, killer silence, the agonizing aloneness and we cry out for being limited, painfully locked up in the box of the body.... Then we can finally fly out and be free. Of our own free will.

Yoga shows the way to Self and Self is freedom. But it does not mean we don't have to go through IT(us); the ego, the mind, what creates burden. Yoga is the fire that burns through all that. 🔥 Yoga is a happy ending journey with loads of learning just like life. And very uncertain.

Every person is a Mantra, everyone has a song in their heart. Every person’s sheath is a special Yantra, a represented form of vibration. Every shape has a frequency and to every frequency belongs a form. All people together form a perfect Mandala, life is perfect in its complexity. All vibrations, frequencies, Mantras, Yantras and Mandalas unite in the sound of creation; AUM and dissolve in the stillness of Turya. Ong, when we co-create, Gong when we reconnect.

Kol Nidre

After a 3 hour Kol Nidre Service…
After using my yoga mat for 14 years every day…
After reciting Japji Sahib daily for over 4 years by heart…
After chanting Sanskrit and Gurmukhi Mantras daily…
After visiting the Golden Temple…
After reading the Bible few times…
After studying the Quran, the Torah and the Sri Guru Granth…
After reading the Mahabharat, the Bhagavad Gita, Peace Lagoon…
After leading ceremonies with Shamans from Guatemala and Peru…
After coming from a huge family with no religious traditions whatsoever, no church goers, not mentioning God’s name amongst about 30 of us in Hungary…

I feel lucky. I found out that I am safe. I am the beloved child of God…wherever the wind blows me. And yes, I can co-create with God…through many traditions and methods. All fellow believers are my sisters and brothers. I love my family; Adonai, Allah, Isten, Yahveh, Ishvara, Krishna, Guru Nanak, Jesus, Buddha, The Shabad…”

In Hungary, where I grew up, in the 1990’s the word karma was very rarely used. It was referred to as a negative expression for a sudden bad happening in one’s life. Mostly people meant God’s punishment, or a payback for a sin one committed. For a long time, I had no idea that karma was a natural law of life and it has its impact on everybody regardless whether they are aware or not.

Twenty five years later, living in the United States, I hear the word karma daily in the supermarket, at the post office, even from kids anywhere they play. Does anyone know exactly what it means? I doubt it but it is definitely more out in the light and there is also certainly more awareness in society than twenty years ago. The paradigm shift fires up our longing to know the unknown and our desire to see beyond the seen. Here is some useful knowledge I learned from my teachers; karma literally means “doing or action” and yogis explain it as the “law of cause and effect”. It plays a huge role in our lives, and often when we ask God why we need to deal with this or that problem, it is just a boomerang that comes back to us. Perhaps from a previous lifetime where we did something that we still have to pay for, the universe always works towards balance.

Karma can be explained by Newton’s Third Law; for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Jesus described it with his own words as: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Karma is; whatever we sow, we reap. If we turn to people with kindness that is what we will receive, if we criticize then we will be criticized by others. Comparing with the 70’s and 80’s, today, 24 hours seem so much shorter. Time seems to have sped up. Our intentions and actions return to us much faster, with some almost instantly pulling us back to the same situations to what we have created for others. In the Aquarian Age all deeds spin back to the sender quickly and 10 folds!! The magnetic field is much stronger as we are getting closer to our soul again. This is another characteristic of the paradigm shift.

By the Master of Kundalini yoga, we are suggested to do Aquarian Sadhana (special daily spiritual practice designed for this era) for 2.5 hours because that is exactly 10% of our day and if we meditate on the creator, and feed our soul with unconditional love for this long, the rest of the day is energetically taken care of by the universe.

Karma means grip in Hungarian, and most humans are in the grip of karma (karma-bandh). Born in a given physical body to work out the owed karma. That is also the reason why we are born under certain circumstances, surrounded by certain people/souls with whom we have a contract. Unfinished stories need to be finished, imbalanced energy exchanges need to be balanced out.

Being bound to Karma is a conditioned state for everybody, yet being born as a human is a special privilege, of which, even the angels are jealous of our physical form. We cannot escape karma even if we escape this incarnation. Suicide is not a solution. Our duty, and karmas remain the same, since we only generate plus complications for the soul. The only way to get out of the cycle of death and birth (Samsara) is to finish gracefully whatever is in our contract and attain liberation. Yoga’s ancient technology shows us how to realize the Self. Yoga and karma are intertwined. Karma is the reason in, yoga is the way out.

Once we commit to practicing yoga, our owed karma begins to kick in and shows up in our life. As we keep up with yoga and our intuition sharpens, the third eye eventually opens up, we begin to understand why we need to go through certain hardships in life. When we follow the steps and basic limbs of yoga, living life truthfully, our “karmic baggage” lessens. The subtle body which encapsulates the soul body stores our karmic information becomes thinner, the energetic imprints (samskaras) continuously being discharged and released.

Very few humans are not conditioned by karma. Avatars are completely free from karma (karma-mukt) and they choose to incarnate and help humanity. They are called bodhisattvas in the Buddhist tradition. One lifetime is usually not enough to attain perfection therefore we reincarnate over and over again, until we learn the lessons and become karma free.

“Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.” – Eckhart Tolle

“How people treat you is their karma, how you react is yours.” – Dr. Wayne Dyer